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Saturday, November 14, 2015

Game Review: Halloween Zombie Strike

It's that time of the year again! Well, it was that time of the year two weeks ago at least. The annual Roblox Halloween Event! Every year the Halloween event is highly anticipated, and rightly so! In the past we've had great events, I've got fond memories of 2009's paintball and treasure hunt (Yes, two games!) while newer members might have fond memories of 2013's The Witching Hour. With this year's event being made by popular users Davidii, creator of 'Survival 404' and 'Heroes!' and Quenty, creator of 'Whatever Floats Your Boat' hopes were high that this would be another event to remember! But was it? Keep reading to find out!

Introduction
This is an on rail shooter, this means you neither have control of your movement nor your camera, the only thing you can control is where you can aim and shoot your gun and the game will take care of the rest for you. Like most events on Roblox a hat was available to win! This year up for grabs was a Nerf Tactical Vest. I'll talk more about that in a minute.

Gameplay
The most important bit of any game! How fun is it? Well, it's alright. That's all I can say about it. It can be a bit enjoyable for a bit until you realize it's just the same thing over, and over, and over again. The gameplay consists of moving to an area and shooting some zombies then moving to a new area and shooting more zombies and so on all in a group of four. To spice it up a bit the zombies start shooting very, very slow projectiles at you which doesn't help the gameplay too much. Yes I know that's what an on rail shooter is but the game just feels a bit too stale.

To get the Nerf Tactical Vest you simply need to kill a zombie wearing the vest, that's it. After getting the vest there's no real reason to keep playing, there's just no incentive, assuming there was an incentive to get the vest in the first place which seems unlikely. That's the biggest problem with the gameplay in my opinion, I just never felt like I needed to or wanted to do this. This definitely reflects in the number of visits, with only 300,000 visits while last year's exceeded 1,000,000.

3/10

Scripting
For me the game worked pretty well overall but many users did report numerous bugs, including the "Missing Zombies Glitch" where no zombies would spawn. Something that did seem a little bit odd for me was the lack of a walking animation for our characters while moving around the map, this just seemed weird as I didn't think it would take much time to implement. Other than the weird walking and the occasional bug though it worked pretty well!

5/10

Sponsorship
You've heard me mention this Nerf Tactical Vest... Nerf... If you can't tell by this and the thumbnail of the game, this game is sponsored by Nerf. No biggy right? Last year's event was sponsored too and that game was fine! Heck, I enjoyed last year's as it was nice and simple without the sponsor taking over too much. If only I could say the same about Nerf this year, wherever you look there's Nerf! Nerf posters, Nerf guns, Nerf prizes, Nerf zombies!

Not only is the word 'Nerf' everywhere but they seem to have had a big part in deciding what the game consisted of too. Take a look at what the creator Davidii said:

"You know, it's a funny story. I went into it expecting to save ROBLOX events too, but at every turn I wanted to add in something interesting or unique, it would run by Nerf and they would say no. They made me use only one weapon. They made me use only one type of ammunition. They vetoed two of the three maps we were planning to use. They would only let us make zombies that were green, and they made us put pumpkins on their heads. I didn't get the time to debug the main game because I was too busy jumping through hoops for Nerf and taking out stuff I'd spent time on."

Davidii also expressed his original intention to add a shop in game and more guns which would've definitely increased my desire to play for longer. For this reason I'm not blaming Davidii and Quenty at all, in fact if anything they should be commended for putting so much effort into the game and for putting up with the restraints they had to work with even if it didn't turn out as good as everybody wanted it to.

Conclusion

I know this isn't Davidii and Quenty's fault but this game didn't end up being that good in my opinion. Without Nerf this may have been a completely different story. At the same time though I'm not blaming Nerf, they obviously gave money to Roblox and so they had the right to do whatever they thought was right to market their product. Perhaps in the future though events like this shouldn't be sponsored to avoid another repeat of this year.

It's a shame as well that all this work is going to waste, I at least hope Davidii and Quenty can go back to this game now that Halloween's over and tweak a few things, add a few new features, remove the Nerf logos and maybe re-release this game as it should be as there are a clear lack of On Rail Shooters on Roblox.

Sadly though, in it's current state I'm going to give the game a score of....

4/10

Thanks for reading my review, what did you think of the game? Tell me in the comments!